Judge: Disabilities led to Temecula student's arrest

An administrative law judge has ruled Temecula Valley Unified School District cannot expel a special needs student arrested in a December undercover sting that targeted drug sales at three high schools.

In a ruling released last week, Judge Marian H. Tully said the district left the then-17-year-old student “to fend for himself, anxious and alone, against an undercover police officer,” and that his actions to procure marijuana for someone he deemed a new friend were significantly influenced by his disabilities.

Tully also found that district officials knowingly allowed the undercover officer to contact the student -- who is not being named per U-T The Californian policy -- while failing to provide him with required counseling and services needed to treat behavioral disorders linked to autism and Asperger's syndrome.

The student -- who was to be reinstated at Chaparral High School within five days of the ruling -- did not receive required counseling during the weeks in which he was befriended by an undercover officer who asked the student to sell him his prescription medication, Tully said.

After the student refused, the undercover officer gave the student $20 to buy him marijuana, according to testimony in Tully’s ruling.

“Finally, the fact that (the) student’s instructors and therapists were unaware that (the) district knowingly exposed (the) student to difficult social interactions with an adult undercover police officer intensified the critical need for them to have properly implemented his (individual education program) in the areas of counseling and speech and language,” Tully wrote. “Accordingly, the student’s conduct that resulted in discipline is directly attributable to the district’s failure to implement his (individual education program).”

The student was one of 22 arrested at three Temecula high schools in December on suspicion of drug sales -- including marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy, heroin, LSD and illegal prescription drugs -- in the culmination of an undercover investigation that featured police officers posing as students.

“The Temecula Valley Unified School District continues to believe it acted appropriately and lawfully in cooperating with the Riverside Sheriff’s Department’s investigation and disciplining students involved in illicit drug sales to police officers at school,” a district statement said. “It does not agree with the interpretation of the legal standards or assessment of evidence from the administrative hearing.”

Wendy Housman, the student’s attorney, contended in a February due process hearing opened to the public by the family that the student was not a "drug dealer." She instead maintained he was a young man who has difficulty making friends and who was hoping to bond with someone “hounding” him with texts and calls.

Several of the student’s teachers and therapists testified during the hearing, some indicating they believed he played up his “bad boy persona” to overcompensate for his disabilities and a lack of social skills that included slow speech and difficulties making eye contact.

At one point -- not long after the student transferred from Temecula Valley to Chaparral and was subsequently befriended by the undercover officer -- the student burned himself with a lighter in what one therapist said was a regression to self-injury behaviors related to anxiety.